National differences in dissemination and use of open access literature

Open Access (OA) dissemination has been gaining a lot of momentum over the last decade, thanks to the implementation of several OA policies by funders and institutions, as well as the development of several new platforms that facilitate the publication of OA content at low or no cost. Studies have shown that nearly half of the contemporary scientific literature could be available online for free. However, few studies have compared the use of OA literature across countries. This study aims to provide a global picture of OA adoption by countries, using two indicators: publications in OA and references made to articles in OA. We find that, on average, low-income countries are publishing and citing OA at the highest rate, while upper middle-income countries and higher-income countries publish and cite OA articles at below world-average rates. These results highlight national differences in OA uptake and suggest that more OA initiatives at the institutional, national, and international levels are needed to support wider adoption of open scholarship.


Unfunded studies
Enter: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.  Nearly half a century since the first use of FTP servers to share scientific papers, the OA movement is still gaining momentum, with the implementation of several OA policies by funders and universities worldwide and the development of new business models by for-profit and non-for-profit publishers. According to several studies, nearly half of research articles could be available online at no cost (3-5). Previous studies have analyzed the availability of articles Several studies aimed to assess the number and percentage of scholarly papers that are freely available online. According to these different studies-which are based on different time periods, methodologies, and disciplines-between 20% and 54% of research articles are currently available online at no cost (3)(4)(5)14). Different aspects of the OA, such as the availability of articles (3)(4)(5)14,15), the so-called citation advantage of OA articles (4,6,7,13,16,17), and compliance to OA mandates (8,18,19), have also been addressed in the the World Bank and the UNESCO data on per capita gross national income (GNI) and found an overuse of closed articles in rich countries. However, their results also showed that the influence of OA was more than twice as strong in developing countries, but they noted that this influence was not as apparent in the very poorest countries where electronic access may be limited. They concluded that while the influence of OA is more modest than it has been proposed in the past, their results supported OA's potential to improve global participation in science. In the biomedical fields, Iyandemye and Thomas (10)  Compliance to mandates vary from the type of mandates (institutional or funding) and across disciplines (8,24). Results obtained by Larivière and Sugimoto (8)

Initiatives and Platforms
Over the last 20 years, several initiatives and platforms have been developed around the world to support OA dissemination. At the world level, UNESCO created the Global Alliance of Open Access Scholarly Communication Platforms to Democratize Knowledge to improve access to scholarly communications following a multicultural, multilingual, and multi-themed approach (26). UNESCO is also currently working on a Recommendation on Open Science that aims to define "shared values and principles for open science" and "identify concrete measures on Open Access and Open Data" (27). This recommendation is expected to be adopted by member states in November 2021. In Europe, Plan S, an ambitious project led by cOAlition S, aims to make every scientific article supported by public funds freely available on the internet by 2021 and remove or lower the article processing charges to low-income or middle-income countries (28).
To illustrate the potential impact of Plan S on the scholarly communication infrastructure, in 2017, 35% of papers published in Nature and 31% of those in Science were funded by at least one of the coalition's members (29).
In Canada, the non-for-profit platform Érudit is now the largest disseminator of French papers in North America. Today, more than 95% of its catalogue is available in OA (30 Access Policy) which mandated that every article funded by the NIH had to be available for free within 12 months after publication (34), which has contributed to the expensive of PMC.
In South America, the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) was created by the Brazilian government in 1997. It aims to provide the infrastructure needed to assist the publishing industry in developing countries and to give more visibility to scientific articles (35).

Research Objectives
The purpose of this paper is to provide a global picture of OA adoption by countries, using two indicators: publications in OA and references made to articles in OA. Our research questions are as follows: The percentage of OA publication varies drastically across disciplines (37) and that the distribution of publications across fields varies by country. To account for this, we calculate the percentage of gold and green OA publications for each country and field, and then calculate the field-weighted average z-score for each country. These z-scores are used for all the countrylevel analyses below.

Results
Tables 1 and 2 presents an overview of our dataset by discipline and type of OA in terms of publications and references, respectively. In table 1, we see that 42.9% of the articles published during the 2015-2019 period were Open Access at the time of our data collection. The proportion of publications in OA varies by fields, ranging from 21.2% in the Humanities to 50% in the Medical and Health Sciences. The very small proportion of papers that are in gold OA only (0.5% -6.1%) shows the large overlap between green and gold OA. In table 2, we see that the share of references to OA papers also varies by fields with Medical and Health Sciences citing more OA papers. However, we can observe that the proportion of references to gold OA articles (7.2%) is generally lower than the proportion of gold OA publications presented in table 1 (18.1%). Overall, the proportion of OA references is lower than the proportion of OA publications.      which indicates that the more a country publishes in OA, the more it is generally likely to make references to OA papers.        Repositories shows that institutional repositories are not well developed. Looking at income levels, our findings also reveal that lower middle-income and low-income countries are those who publish and cite the most OA. Again, this may be partly explained by the fact that APCs are generally waived for these countries, making publishing in gold OA more accessible for them. Moreover, some commercially owned gold OA journals may have less strict publication criteria and given the lack of research infrastructure in these countries, they may be more likely to publish in these journals (38). We also found that the upper-middle-income countries tend to behave similarly to the higher-income countries. However, the underlying mechanisms behind the use of OA potential may be different. For instance, upper middle-income countries may lack the resources to pay for APCs on top of high subscription prices for closed journals (both of which they don't qualify for waivers), and which is not necessarily the case for high-income countries. There may also be other factors, such as a lower reputation of OA journals in certain parts of the world. Another interesting finding is that while low-income countries use both green and gold OA, high-income countries generally tend to favour green OA. This may imply that even in the richest countries on the planet, researchers may still struggle to pay APCs. Overall, our results seem to confirm previous studies (9,10) which both found that low income countries tend to publish in OA more than the other countries, despite the fact that the former having been conducted more than a decade ago and the latter only assessing biomedical research. Ultimately, while high-income countries have mandates and repositories, and low-income countries have waivers, our results highlight national differences in OA uptake and suggest that more OA Center will only be free for the duration of the pandemic (40). Despite the existence of geological tensions (41)(42)(43) and initiatives such as China's move to ensure that funded studies on COVID-19 will be published in Chinese journals over international journals (44), the majority of countries have increased their number of international collaborations and have generally increased their share of OA literature (43,45). However, it has been shown that countries' previous OA dissemination practices had no significant effect on their OA publication practices during the ongoing global pandemic: the extent to which a country was affected by COVID-19 was the main factor for OA publication (43). Another important finding from Lee and Haupt study is that countries with a higher GDP may not engage as much as other countries in international collaboration and open access during the global crisis, most likely because they are less dependent on outside collaborators. These findings have several implications for our study. First, the pandemic may help middle-income countries to participate and alleviate the divide in the uptake of OA since they do not necessarily have the necessary funding and resources to produce national COVID-19 research. Second, with high-income countries being more reluctant to participate in global collaboration and publish their COVID-19 research in OA, it highlights the importance of the various OA mandates, policies, and repositories in place. It remains to be seen whether this recent trend created by the pandemic will persist over time. Ultimately, the current crisis shows the necessity for more sustainable OA dissemination channels: as long as the research community is dependent on private forprofit publishers, the "openness" of articles will depend on either the "good will" of those publishers or on the scientific community's capacity and willingness to pay for it.